David Coleman “The Fourteenth Day”

Fifty years ago this week the world stood on the brink of nuclear war — perhaps the closest we ever came to World War III — as the U.S. and Soviet Union stared each other down over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba.

History has dubbed it the “Cuban missile crisis.” And history has duly recorded that it ended on October 28th, 1962, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba.

Todd Brewster “Lincoln’s Gamble” American history books often compress momentous events into capsules, summaries, one-line explanations.Such has often been the case with President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the history-changing…